Scientists Clash over Whaling Some Nations Worry Whaling Could Resume If Changes in Whale Management Are Adopted

Article excerpt

AMID the icebergs on the open seas off Antarctica, Greenpeace
ecoactivists are waging bow-to-bow skirmishes with a Japanese ship
as it hunts, kills, and then studies minke whales in a
government-supported research project.

While Greenpeace's confrontation tactics are drawing world
attention and official Japanese ire, a more subdued encounter over
whales is taking place. A group of scientists who advise the
International Whaling Committee (IWC) are attending a workshop in
Copenhagen (Feb. 24 to 28) to debate a proposed new formula for
maintaining sustainable populations of the giant sea mammals. What
the scientists come up with may heavily influence the outcome of
the IWC's annual meeting in June.

Anti-whaling members of the committee are concerned because
changes in the formula could allow commercial whaling, which has
been prohibited since 1985, to resume. "There is pressure because
the IWC is getting closer to permitting whaling. This year's
meeting will be intense," says Tim Smith, head of the United States
scientific delegation to the IWC and chief of marine mammals
investigation at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods
Hole, Mass.

Japan's project, referred to as lethal research, is just one
bone of contention among the IWC scientists, who come from both
whaling and nonwhaling nations. A larger issue is whether any
management formula can adequately calculate the number of whales
that can be caught and still maintain a sustainable population.
Even among the scientists, feelings are strong.

"What it comes down to is social, cultural, and ethical
differences," says Christopher Clark, a member of the IWC's
scientific committee and director of the Bioacoustics Research
Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "People use science
for emotional purposes."

Since the moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect in
1985, Japan has been allowed to kill up to 330 minke whales a year
for scientific population studies. The government-backed Japan
Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) in Tokyo conducts the studies.
One of the institute's aims is to measure the reproductive and
mortality rates of the minkes, which it insists can be done only by
killing a whale and studying its ears and organs.

Compared with other whale species, the minke population may be
large enough to permit "harvesting" in controlled numbers,
according to IWC scientists.

But even though the IWC agreed last year that approximately
760,000 minkes inhabit the Antarctic Ocean, the IWC did not allow
commercial whaling of minke, citing deficiencies in the present
management formula.

Japanese officials say that the IWC is packed with anti-whaling
nations. Frustrated with scientific debates being overshadowed by
political agendas, Iceland, a pro-whaling nation, announced in
January that it would withdraw from the IWC after this year's
meeting.